309: Macroforge

ENTRY 309: Macroforge

"We built the pyramids with bronze tools and rope. We assembled the Eifel Tower with less than two hundred people. We chiseled Mount Rushmore out of the mountain with dynamite. Now look at us, living in tin cans, cramped where ever we can fit when all the solar system is ours. Why did we ever stop? When did we start thinking so small? Microtech, nanotech. Fuck that noise. Let's build something they'll see from another planet. Dream big."
- Jaq Prime, First Among Engineers

Vast city-habitats float above a half dozen worlds. Spacecraft with a volume measured in cubic kilometers drift silently through the vacuum. Space elevators stretch into orbit, millions of meters of nanotubes linked together. Three-dimensional printing is nearly ubiquitous in the solar system, nanotech makers pumping out all manner of goods, but they are limited in scale and capabilities, and while their products are adequate for most purposes few are suitable to large-scale construction. With their little printers, most designers and techies dream small, playing at lower scales. But there are some transhumans who are not afraid to dream big.

Orbiting Mercury, where solar power is cheap and material from the Belt is plentiful, is the Macroforge, a clunky grey donut with six great spokes, between which hangs a spiderweb of solar cells hanging on nanocarbon cables. The bulk of the industrial cluster habitat is one massive three-dimensional printer, which can assemble entire spacecraft and habitats within its depths. The bulk of this work is automated; each megaconstruction is embodied in a single Grand Design, which is broken down into component parts, which are in turn broken down into generic 3D printer designs - right down to the tiniest screws and linkages. Boundary printers churn out the materials, which are transported to treatment and manufacturing bays to be processed and fitted together, and so on and so forth with larger and larger component sections finally being brought together to form the finished product.

The engineers, technicians, and programmers of the habitat work predominantly to refine the processes and designs, testing and evaluating new materials and methods, and troubleshooting any errors that crop up in the Grand Design. Most of the inhabitants are autonomists, though the habitat eschews politics in favor of a mutual purpose: to dream build, and to build big. The organization is a representative meritocracy, with each engineering discipline headed by the most knowledgeable and effective of their members, who takes the lead in internal design philosophy, doling out work assignments, and communicating with the other engineering disciplines. First Among Engineers is Jaq Prime, a multi-disciplinary engineer who has been authorized by the other engineering heads to negotiate contracts and represent the Macroforge when dealing with the Planetary Consortium and other reps, though she has no local powers or authority - and likes it that way. Most of the accessory duties (technical writing, technicians, logistics, etc.) is handled by the engineers' family and hired staff, including some services purchased from hypercorps.

Using the Macroforge

Scale is a tricky concept in roleplaying games. Climbing a mountain means nothing when it consists of a single skill check; distances measured in light minutes are transversed by player characters during a potty break. Sometimes players need to feel the size and scope of what they're up against - to stand in awe and soak up the flavor text, when the shadow of a passing habitat being towed into position temporarily blocks out the sun and stars; or they walk and walk for hours on the side of Mons Olympus, only to pause at the edge of space and look back to see the fragile web of lights om the plains and hills laid out below as night comes on. It is so easy in Eclipse Phase to forget how vast the scale is of planets, how terribly far away transhuman habitats are from one another, how tremendously huge that transhuman science and engineering can now build when they choose to dream big. The Macroforge is a setting where PCs can see the guts of titanic ships and the monumental skeletons of habitats as they are being built; to stand in awe for a few moments in the cathedral-spaces and wonder at what transhumans can create.

303: Hyperia Light Mining Co.

ENTRY 303: Hyperia Light Mining Co.

There are estimated to be over one million asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer in the Main Belt alone, with a total mass only four percent of Luna - and yet that represents a greater exposed mineral wealth than has been mined in all of transhuman history. Miners tend to focus on the metal-rich M-type asteroids, looking for the easy pickings in the form of close-to-the-surface nodes and exposed veins. Yet even though there is wealth enough out there for generations of bouncers to ply their trade, stories roll in of "played out" mines and being "beaten to the punch" as an indie miner rolls up to a promising specimen and finds that the richest outer takings have already been worked over by a previous miner. Outside of any habitat's legal jurisdiction, claim fights can quickly get vicious.

Hyperia Light Mining Co. aims to solve that problem. Originally a microcorp asteroid miner based out of Ceres, Hyperia specialized in surveying, and quickly found that they did not have the resources to exploit their finds, and that it was more lucrative to sell their findings to other miners than try to capitalize on all of them. So Hyperia has begun the transition to a data services corporation, buying and bartering for astronomical, fiscal, and survey data, building up the biggest archive of the Main Belt currently in existence. Complicating the matter somewhat is that their main "competition" is also their customer base.

FreeMiner is a Mesh-based app where surveyors and miners in the Main Belt (and beyond) can upload their data to a volunteer community database, showcasing asteroids, claims, mineralogical surveys, core samples, distinguishing features, amusing rock formations, graffiti tags, individual profiles, etc. As with other community projects the quality of the data varies, made more difficult because follow-ups and confirmations are expensive undertakings and many miners prefer to keep data to themselves, or even seed FreeMiner with false or misleading data. At least one mining corporation tried to close FreeMiner over use of its proprietary data, but couldn't find a suitable jurisdiction to pursue the case - and when their hackers tried to hit the site, they found themselves facing every miner with an access jack and quickly backed off.

Hyperia deals with FreeMiner by working with the app instead of against it. They pay credits for verified, high-quality survey data; post "bounty lists" of asteroids that they particularly want miners and surveyors to check out; issue surveyor qualification tests and digital certificates; and issue updates to FreeMiner via a 'ransom' model, averaging once a week. The microcorp makes no bones that this is a business as well as a community service, and sometimes attempts new products like "elite memberships" for FreeMiner with access to advanced algorithmic tools that suggest asteroids which are unclaimed and mathematically likely to have good deposits, but such efforts have had little 'stick' so far, as the data is often pirated and posted onto the normally accessible FreeMiner in short order. Still, individual miners and hypercorps sometimes hire Hyperia for private computations or even early access to their regular updates.

Seeds

• The player characters are hired as security by a Hyperia surveyor out to catalog an unusually small, compact asteroid family which is being picked over by rival miners - one of which is one bad job away from turning into full-blown space pirates. If they can keep the surveyor alive and get the data out safe, they'll find that not only do they get paid, but they've developed a small rep in the Belt community and have several job offers waiting when they get back.
• A malicious hacker is going to obscure corners of FreeMiner and changing key data, costing the community considerable time and effort to clean up their work - enough that a group of sysadmins gets together and offers a bounty if the PCs break their limbs and tell them to knock that shit off. Of course, when they get to the hacker's domicile, it turned out to be a 12-year old menton who was just having a bit of fun...
• Hyperia wants to expand beyond the Main Belt, consolidating data from other Mesh apps into a single pan-Solar Mining Registry. The project is still in its early stages, and dealing with all the different local apps and miners is proving a headache, especially for a microcorp that doesn't have much presence outside the Belt. The PCs are hired to act as Hyperia's representatives on their habitat to negotiate with the local miners, surveyors, app-programmers, etc. However, the locals are suspicious, and to earn their trust the PCs will have to join the local Mining Guild and be certified as surveyors. Hyperia will pay for the classes, but can't prepare them for the initiations, which may venture from the ridiculous ("the hair vacsuit") to the dangerous ("dead man's spacewalk" - a short trip through vacuum without an vacsuit - don't hold your breath!)

242: The Sleeping Generation

ENTRY 242: The Sleeping Generation

Desperate times call for imperfect technologies, executed with the best of intentions and plans based on whatever knowledge is available, but are not necessarily viable in the long run. Yet it is an adage not to trust all your transhuman egos to a single strategy, but to spread the risk by trying to save a portion of those lives by other means. So while in some cities ships pulled off the ground with entire transhumans, and others had their egos copied and sent off into space while their physical forms left behind, a minority of other approaches were being tried in corners of the Earth where resources for these relatively safe and sure technologies were not available.

In Munich, multiple egos were spliced together to fit within the limited number of storage devices together. In Kookaburra, a group of prominent government leaders had their egos transferred into uplifted koalas so more egos could escape in the low-mass bodies. In Bengal, dozens of families made it into low-earth orbit using high-altitude balloons, with the hope that they could be towed further up the gravity well. And in Johannesburg, they started lopping off heads.

Faced with a severe mass limitation but lacking the resources to upload entire egos, the last-minute flight from Johannesburg was a matter of brutal math. Surgeons worked tirelessly removing the heads of the volunteers, which were passed off to medical technicians to attach to the life-keeping apparatus that would keep them alive for the duration of the flight, each head locked into place in the crowded rocket ship and placed in a full VR simulation for the duration of the trip. Fifteen thousand heads were packed into the Queen Mujabi in 38 hours, and the ship was launched towards the Main Belt. They were the only survivors.

Many of them didn’t survive. At least three thousand heads succumbed to trauma or infection in the first six months; over a hundred others succumbed to insanity and exercised a built in right-to-life protocol. The slow ship finally docked with Nova York in AF 2, which was hard-pressed to deal with the sudden influx due to a shortage of morphs. Roughly half of the surviving Johannesburg heads opted to remain as they were until bodies could be cloned for them, while the others resleeved as informorphs or whatever cheap synths were available, some agreeing to contracts of indentured servitude for better bodies. A little over five thousand heads remain, connected by VR, on the Queen Mujabi—relicts of the Fall that the Nova York media have dubbed “The Sleeping Generation.”

Mechanics

The bodiless heads of the Sleeping Generation are all Flats. While they do technically have physical forms (and can thus receive whatever augmentations a head can accommodate), they have an effective SOM of 1, Wound Threshold of 1, and Durability 6, though given that all of them are incased in jars full of pseudoamniotic fluid and hooked up to major medical equipment, this should not be something that ever really comes into play. Nova York has upgraded all of the surviving heads with Medichines to counteract the long-term damage of being disembodied heads in jars, and the VR equipment is effectively the same as Basic Mesh Inserts. For PCs that for some reason want to be a head in a jar, the cost for this morph is Moderate.

220: Mother Okunya

ENTRY 220: Mother Okunya

In the Ge-Rouge residential quarter of the Legba habitat in the Main Belt, she is everyone’s grandmother—a strong but thin and wrinkled woman who will treat every child as one of her own, and every one younger than her as her child. She moves through the community on her errands, busy with purpose, but she always has a kind word, a shoulder to cry on, a handkerchief for snotty noses, and a tube of vacuum seal for every rupture. She has healed marriages and ended them with a word, and her condemnation can mean slow death as their contacts unfriend them from their networks and their rep plummets. All this she accomplishes with the same toothless smile, the kind that lets her tend to her knitting while some of her boys and girls tie the battery wires around someone’s testicles.

The Nine Lives find Mother Okunya effective at policing her section of the habitat, and mostly leave her to it so long as she does not directly involve herself in their business. Indeed, many of the Nine Lives owe her favors, though she never seems to let them stay indebted to her for too long, nor asks for more than any of them can readily part with. In her neighborhood, every eye is her spy, every hand one of her tools. Those who come there always make right with Mother Okunya if they know what’s good for them, and for those who are ignorant she surprises with a visit.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
28	15	20	15	15	10	20	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
7	1	40	8	80	35	7	50

Morph: Menton

Skills: Academics: Psychology (Testing) 55, Academics: Sociaology (Initiations) 55, Art: XP Editing 50, Interests: Old Earth Cultures 30, Interests: Teaching Methods 35, Interests: Torture Methods 50, Interfacing 30, Investigation 30, Intimidation (Torture): 50, Kinesics 60, Language: Native Swahili 95, Language: Arabic 90, Language: English 90, Language: French 75, Language: Yoruba 75, Networking: Firewall 25, Networking: Scientists 25, Profession: Interrogator 50, Profession: Teacher 60, Research 77

Implants: Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Hyper-Linguist, Math Boost, Multi-tasking, Oracles

Traits: Fast Learner

Using Mother Okunya

This minor crime boss/social hub sees herself as placed in this universe to test those people in it, to find them wanting or deserving depending on their merits. She has no malice or mercy in her soul, and will never, ever break character from the harmless old woman until the trap is shut. For PCs coming to Legba for the first time, she will seem a relatively harmless NPC—the neighborhood’s grandmother—come to greet them and give them a small gift. How they react determines how they are going to be treated for the rest of their stay. The longer the PCs stay in her demesne, the more little tests she will place before them—what do they PCs do when accused of theft? What do they do if they find a valuable object, just lying about? If someone gives them a gift? If a child has an accident in front of them and is injured? If a father takes his son to the walkway and whips him with an electrical cord in public? Keep in mind that Mother Okunya does not follow normal moral or ethical guides; her philosophy is more severe and survival oriented. Violence is met by sudden and overwhelming violence as the entire residential district turns against them; kindness and respect repaid by friendly and helpful locals; dishonesty by firm but polite refusal of service; nobility and honesty by whatever help it is in her power to give. However, the longer the PCs stay the more involved and personal the tests will become—and attentive PCs might notice that none of the long-term residents of Ge-Rouge is without a scar or missing some body part.

113: Hope's End

ENTRY 113: Hope’s End

Habitats fail. Life goes on. Hopewell habitat was a mid-size belter colony established on  the asteroid 5475 Hanskennedy. Reasonably self-sufficient, Hopewell had not yet established full trade and social links when comm systems went dark. No one investigated checked to see how the station was doing for nine years.

Contact finally came from an exploratory mission out of Eros, a small but fully-equipped military expedition designed to chart out the station for possible scavenge or recolonization. Fearing a possible remnant of the TITANs, the Red Zone forces exercised an extremely cautious approach, sending out robot probes to tap Hopewell’s computer system from outside.

What they found was a feral colony—most systems in good condition, maintained by automated machinery and routines, but the population reduced to savagery. Of the two hundred and sixty original colonists, perhaps thirty remain, split into three social groups. Faced with legitimate (if feral) owners rather than an abandoned station, the Planetary Consortium moved in, establishing a permanent observation post so that sociologists could study the phenomenon.

The oldest of the survivors appears to be a female in late adolescence, with only limited knowledge of how to interact with the station’s systems, and no access to its higher functions. This, along with supplementary evidence, suggests that some violent unrest led to the death of the entire adult population of Hopewell early in the life-cycle of the colony, leaving the children to fend for themselves—growing up and starting to have children of their own.

While some transhumans protest this “natural experiment,” what interests the Planetary Consortium sociologists is that despite the name, the inhabitants of Hopewell—known generally as “Hope’s End” on the Mesh—have only really been limited by what they can access through the station’s data archives. The first generation residents have self-educated themselves on maintenance, first-aid, basic chemistry, language, music, philosophy, and self-government; their only real limitations in this regard are the checks that their parents and guardians imposed on “restricted” material—including all but the most basic sex education, pornography, pharmacology, and any advanced medicinal knowledge, as well as the administrative controls for the station and certain "subversive" political ideologies and technologies. As such, while conversant on how to replace and clean an air filter, a Hope’s End feral has limited knowledge of childbirth procedures and no knowledge of recreational drugs beyond nitrous oxide, which is one of the principal forms of entertainment.

Seeds

• Jhil Nightbreaker wants to stage an intrusion that will bust open the “natural experiment” at Hope’s End, but she needs a little help—a group of go-to transhumans willing to sneak about the observation post and plant a virus that will unlock the restricted portions of the Hopewell database. Of course, all they have to do is sneak past the Red Zone security while Jhil sets up a diversion…
• After nine years of automated labor and only minimal maintenance, several of the key life-support systems of Hope’s End are near collapse. To preserve the “natural experiment,” the sociologists need a stealth team to sneak into the station through a forgotten airlock and perform critical upgrades. Fortunately, the administration area was off-limits to the children and is mostly intact, so the PC’s only difficulty will be getting in and out of their quietly. Unfortunately, one of the social groups is rabidly xenophobic and will turn their improvised weapons on any outsiders they run across along the way…